The Rise of Creative Philanthropy

#1 Thing You Need to Learn from this Post:
With the proliferation of easy-to-use media tools, new people are entering the cause arena and launching innovative ways to raise money and awareness for the issues they care about. These creative philanthropists will continue to play a role in shaping the charitable sector.

A More Detailed Exploration:
Thankfully, it doesn’t take a special certification to do something for a cause. It just takes a desire to make a difference and the willingness to act.

While many non-profit leaders and fundraisers deliberate how to integrate online and social media into their operations, a new group of people are showing them how it can be done. The only question in my mind is: Are they even watching?

Welcoming the Creative Class
As the knowledge economy continues to grow, the importance of the creative class does, too. According to the economist and social scientist Richard Florida, “the Creative Class is a class of workers whose job is to create meaningful new forms.” He contends that this is an emergent demographic playing an important role in spurring innovation and economic growth.

With the velocity of change increasing because of the intimacy and immediacy demanded of the Interconnected Age, every sector of the economy needs to attract and engage creative thinkers and doers to help them stay relevant to the marketplace. That goes for philanthropy, too.

What is Creative Philanthropy?
Creative philanthropy is the innovative use of media and technology to raise awareness and money for charitable organizations, most often by individuals coming from outside the non-profit sector. While it’s possible for it to occur within existing non-profit organizations, most of them do not have the structure or culture to cultivate it.

As Peter Panapento and I discussed in this recent Chronicle of Philanthropy podcast, creative philanthropists are adept at online and social media and use them as the natural extension of their concern for a specific issue or cause. They see a problem, craft a solution using media and technology, and deploy it with often nothing more than a website and social media accounts.

Examples of Creative Philanthropy
To help illustrate the concept, here are two examples of Creative Philanthropy:

Blame Drew’s Cancer
About six months ago, Drew Olanoff found out the lump on the side of his neck was cancerous. Within days of his diagnosis, Drew launched the website www.blamedrewscancer.com and asked for everyone to help him take down cancer. The idea was intentionally simple – use Twitter to blame cancer for anything that goes wrong. If you get a flat tire, just tweet out what happened and use the hashtag #blamedrewscancer.

When he launched, he did not have a non-profit partner or any corporate sponsors.  But he did promise that he would find them, which he has since fulfilled.  Drew’s aligned his efforts with the Livestrong Foundation, partnered with 23andme.com, and now is collaborating with Drew Carey of television fame.

Earlier this fall, Drew announced that he would be auctioning off his lucrative Twitter handle, @drew, to the highest bidder with 100% of the proceeds to benefit the Livestrong Foundation.  With a number of celebrities named Drew, Olanoff thought at least one of them would step forward and perhaps buy it for a few thousand dollars.  That was until Drew Carey (@DrewfromTV) stepped forward and pledged $25,000.  Then, he upped the ante to $100,000 if at least 100,000 followed him on Twitter.  Shortly after, he raised the stakes again and said he would donate $1 for every Twitter follower he has on December 31, 2009 – up to $1 million.

Not bad for a guy who just finished his final round of chemotherapy.

As the host of the widely popular Price is Right and a beloved television star, Drew Carey doesn’t need this to grow his Twitter follower base.  Instead, he’s decided to use his celebrity to help shine a light on a worthy cause and help a creative philanthropist achieve his goal. If you haven’t already, you can help by following him on Twitter here or by visiting www.milliondollardrew.com, a site launched to promote this yearend drive.

Tweetsgiving
Last year during the week of Thanksgiving, Stacey Monk launched Tweetsgiving only six days after she and her team at Epic Change came up with the idea.  Epic Change is a non-profit organization that was founded after a life-changing trip Stacey took in 2007 to Africa, where she witnessed the enormity of abject poverty.  This experience inspired her to leave her career as a management consultant and devote her energies to helping fund entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Over the past year, I have had the pleasure to get to know Stacey personally and professionally.  She is a great standard bearer for Creative Philanthropy.

Here’s a quick summary of what she led, as taken from the Tweetsgiving website:

Epic Change launched the original TweetsGiving celebration in November 2008 as a 48-hour celebration of gratitude and giving that successfully raised over $10,000 to build a classroom in Arusha, Tanzania. Imagined and built entirely by volunteers in six days, TweetsGiving was launched 2 days before the US Thanksgiving holiday, and quickly became the #1 trending topic on Twitter as thousands of grateful tweets from across the globe filled the stream, and hundreds of blogs, from Mashable to VentureBeat, spread the story. (Click here and here to see additional metrics.)

Epic Change invested the funds to build a classroom at a school founded by Tanzanian Epic Change fellow “Mama Lucy” Kamptoni, a woman who used to sell chickens and used her income to build a school that now serves over 300 children near her home in Arusha.  In this classroom built from gratitude, the Twitter handles of donors are now painted on the walls.

Over the past year, Stacey and her team have followed up their fundraising efforts with a series of impact stories about the Fifth Graders now learning in that classroom. Just recently, they outfitted Mama Lucy with her own Twitter account (@MamaLucy), started the hashtag #TwitterKids, and created a Twitter list for people to connect with the class directly.

Having much more lead time this year, Stacey and her team are on the verge of launching Tweetsgiving 2009, another 48-hour celebration.  This time around, they have organized groups of people from different cities from across the world to help promote the drive through a combination of online and in-person events.

Be sure to watch for the flurry of gratitude on Twitter starting at 12 noon ET on Tuesday, November 24.  Or, find an event near you and join in the holiday festivities.  And, don’t forget to share your gratitude with others.

So, What Do You Have to Say?
Now that I’ve said my piece, what do you think? What are other examples of Creative Philanthropy? Can Creative Philanthropy happen within existing non-profits?